U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon criticized special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday in a three-page order regarding his latest filing in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump.
Smith asserted that Cannon was pursuing a “wrong” legal premise concerning jury instructions regarding the Presidential Records Act, and he urged her to make a prompt ruling on the matter so that he could file an appeal if she ruled in favor of the former president.
He also argued she was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” about her request for competing jury instructions regarding the PRA.
“The PRA’s distinction between personal and presidential records has no bearing on whether a former President’s possession of documents containing national defense information is authorized under the Espionage Act, and the PRA should play no role in the jury instructions,” Smith said in the filing. “Indeed, based on the current record, the PRA should not play any role at trial at all.”
“Furthermore, Trump’s entire effort to rely on the PRA is not based on any facts,” Smith continues. “Instead he has attempted to fashion out of whole cloth a legal presumption that would operate untethered to any facts — without regard to his actual decisions, his actual intent, the unambiguous definition of what constitutes personal records under the PRA, or the plainly non-personal content of the highly classified documents he retained.”
“There is no basis in law or fact for that legal presumption, and the Court should reject Trump’s effort to invent one as a vehicle to inject the PRA into this case,” he concluded.
Smith’s filing came in response to a separate court filing by Trump’s legal team requesting that Cannon dismiss the case “because a federal records law protected him from prosecution,” the filing said, referring to the PRA.
Cannon rejected Trump’s motion that argued the PRA had priority over the Espionage Act, which he has been charged under. The judge clarified that the PRA does not offer a pre-trial basis for dismissing the charges against Trump, including the mishandling and obstruction charges, the Washington Post reported.
But she also took issue with the tone of Smith’s filing, the outlet added:
Even as she ruled against Trump’s motion, Cannon’s three-page order also revealed her displeasure over Smith’s characterization of her order, suggesting this may not be the last such battle in the historic prosecution of a former president and the presumptive GOP presidential candidate.
The Trump appointee added, “The Court declines the Special Counsel’s demand for anticipatory finalization of jury instructions prior to trial, prior to a charge conference, and prior to the presentation of trial defenses and evidence, as such a demand is unprecedented and unfair.”
Cannon noted further that her request for the proposed jury instructions “should not be misconstrued as declaring a final definition on any essential element or asserted defense in this case.”
Rather, she wrote, it was “a genuine attempt, in the context of the upcoming trial, to better understand the parties’ competing positions and the questions to be submitted to the jury in this complex case of first impression,” according to the order.
